Tuning perception and decisions to temporal context

Philippe Blondé; Árni Kristjánsson; David Pascucci

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2023.108008

Tuning perception and decisions to temporal context

iScience. 2023 Sep 22;26(10):108008. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2023.108008. eCollection 2023 Oct 20.

Authors

Philippe Blondé¹, Árni Kristjánsson¹, David Pascucci²

Affiliations

¹ Icelandic Vision Laboratory, School of Health Sciences, University of Iceland, Reykjavik, Iceland.
² Laboratory of Psychophysics, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland.

Abstract

Recent work suggests that serial dependence, where perceptual decisions are biased toward previous stimuli, arises from the prior that sensory input is temporally correlated. However, existing studies have mostly used random stimulus sequences that do not involve such temporal consistencies. Here, we manipulated the temporal statistics of visual stimuli to examine the role of true temporal correlations in serial dependence. In two experiments, observers reproduced the orientation of the last stimulus in a sequence, while we varied temporal correlations in the stimulus features at two timescales: stimulus history within the trial and decision history across trials. We found a clear dissociation: increasing temporal correlation in the stimulus history led to adaptation-like repulsive biases, whereas increasing temporal correlation in the decision history reduced attractive biases. Thus, we suggest that temporal correlation enhances the discriminative ability of the visual system, revealing the fundamental role of the broader temporal context.

Keywords: Cognitive neuroscience; Sensory neuroscience.